Bad Business

36

Wilma Cooper was gardening in the vast backyard of her home in Lincoln.

"I always garden in the morning," she had said without looking at me. "Summers are so short."

I walked up the long curve of the driveway and across a brick patio bigger than my apartment and around to the back of the house where she had told me she'd be.

A nd there she was, in a halter top, an ankle-length blue denim sundress, a huge straw hat, big yellow gardening gloves, and battered brown sandals. She was, in fact, big. Tall, rawboned, angular, with weathered skin and a pinched face that made her look worried. The gray hair that showed under her hat looked permed.

She took off her gloves to shake hands with me, and looked off to the left over my right shoulder while she did so. There was iced tea in a big pitcher on a lacy green metal table, with four lacy green metal chairs. Beside the tea was a small plate of Oreo cookies. We sat.

"I really don't see how I can be of help to you," she said. "I know little of my husband's business affairs."

"It was nice of you to make the iced tea," I said.

"What? Oh. Yes. I mean, I ... thank you."

This was not a good sign. If she had trouble with thanks for the iced tea, how would she do with, did your husband kill anybody? I decided to be circumspect. She poured us each some iced tea.

"Terrible thing about Mr. Gavin," I said.

I drank a little of my iced tea. It was made from a mix, I was pretty sure. Pre-sweetened. Diet. She looked at hers. Then sort of obliquely at me, and smiled vaguely. At what?

"Yes," she said after a while.

"Did you know him well?"

She thought about that for a little while. Far below us at the distant bottom of the backyard, a sprinkler went on by itself.

"Ah . . . Steve ... was in our wedding."

"Really?"

She nodded. There was nothing else to drink so I swilled in a bit more of the ersatz iced tea.

"So you've been friends for a long time," I said.

She smiled again at nothing, and looked down the slope of her backyard.

"He was my husband's friend, really," she said.

"You didn't socialize."

"Oh ... no ... not really."

I took a quiet breath.

"Did you know Trent Rowley?"

"Ah, yes."

"Marlene Rowley?"

"She ... she was ... Trent's wife ... I believe."

"Bernie and Ellen Eisen?"

"He worked with my husband," she said.

A full sentence. She was getting into the flow.

"But you didn't socialize," I said.

She shook her head and giggled slightly. Then she stood suddenly. Or as suddenly as Big Wilma was as likely to do anything.

"Excuse me," she said. "I have to do something in the house."

Then she turned and walked away. I watched her go. Her movements were stiff, as if she were not used to them. Was she leaving me in the lurch, or would she be back? I decided to wait it out. After all I had a whole pitcher of iced tea and a lovely platter of cookies. The circle at the far end of the sloping lawn made a fine spray full of small prismatic rainbows. A cardinal swooped past me, on his way someplace. Had it been something I said? I considered more tea and rejected the idea. It certainly wasn't my appearance. I had on my Ray-Bans, always a classic look. Extending the look, I was wearing a dark blue linen blazer with white buttons, a white silk tee shirt, a shortbarreled Smith & Wesson revolver with a walnut handle in a black leather hip holster, pressed jeans, and black New Balance cross trainers with no socks. How could she bear to leave me?

She couldn't. She reappeared and walked briskly back across her patio toward me.

"Sorry," she said with a smile, "something I forgot."

"Sure," I said.

She looked right at me. Her eyes were bright and wide. She sat down and drank some tea.

"So," she said, "where were we?"

"You didn't socialize much with the Eisens."

"No."

"Lovely home," I said.

"Thank you," she said. "I was born here."

She picked up an Oreo cookie and popped it in her mouth and chewed and swallowed.

"Really?" I said.

Y ou get a workable response, you stick with it.

"Yes, I moved here with my husband after my mother died."

"That's great," I said. Mr. Enthusiasm. "Be an expensive house to buy now."

"I could afford it," she said.

"Mr. Cooper does very well," I said.

"I could afford it without Mr. Cooper," she said. "I have plenty of money of my own."

"Family money," I said, just to say something.

"Yes. In fact my husband's own wealth is actually family money too."

"His family or yours?"

"The business in which my husband has been so successful was once known as Waltham Tool and Pipe. My father started it after the war. When I married my husband, Dad took him into the business, and when Dad retired he made my husband the chief executive officer."

"I know it's indiscreet," I said, "to ask. But who has the most money, you or Mr. Cooper."

"Oh, God," she said. "I could buy and sell him ten times over."

She ate another Oreo.

"Did you ever meet a man named Darrin O'Mara?" I said.

"The sex man on the radio?"

"Yes."

"God no. Why do you ask? I would have little interest in anything he had to say."

"He is apparently a friend of your husband's."

"That's ridiculous," Big Wilma said. "My husband would have no reason to spend time with someone like O'Mara."

"He was apparently friends with the Eisens and the Rowleys too," I said.

"I'm not surprised," she said.

"Why?"

"Why am I not surprised?"

"Yeah."

"It's the kind of repugnant claptrap with which women like that would become involved."

"So you do know these women?" I said.

"I know what they're like," Big Wilma said.

We talked until she had eaten all the Oreos and drunk most of the iced tea.

Finally she said, "I'm sorry to be rude, but I'm developing a dreadful headache, and I simply must lie down."

"A lotta that going around," I said. "Everybody I talk to."

She smiled politely and I left. No loss. I wasn't learning anything. Driving back in Route 2, I speculated on what Big Wilma had ingested when she went inside. And whether what I saw afterward was Jekyll or Hyde.